Fawad Mir

Floating apps are a great way to take extra advantage of your screen space. In addition to looking good, they are a great aid for multitasking and making use of the large screen real estate you get with an Android tablet. Previously, we have come across some very useful floating apps, such as Floating Audio, that lets you play audio and control the playback on top of any screen that you are working on and Floating Browser Flux!, a feature-rich Android browser that allows you to work with 10 tabs at any given time. Based on the same concept, Floating YouTube Popup Video is another similar app that provides you with the freedom to play YouTube videos outside the YouTube app and in a floating window accessible from anywhere in the OS. It lets you resize the floating window and position it anywhere on the screen, enabling you to watch videos while you reply to messages and emails or perform other tasks. More on the app after the jump.
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Many of us listen to online music streams while doing several other activities like work, exercise, commuting and what not. While there are countless streaming services available that offer something for everyone's taste, a times you just need the music to be available offline in order to listen to it on the go, especially in areas where you don't have wireless broadband, or just to cut down on your data connection bills. Also, at times you are listening to a radio station and on comes a song that you like instantly. You keep waiting for the presenter to call out the name of the song and artist at the end but it doesn't happen, and you are left wondering which song that was. You can search for it using different methods such as Googling its lyrics, but that in itself can be a bit too much trouble, especially in case of less-known indie music. ESFSoft Radio Downloader helps you with that by allowing you to download radio streams from Shoutcast.com and automatically save them to your computer. The application downloads each song in a different file, letting you easily create a complete playlist.
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Compared to its predecessors, the Windows 8 UI has received a major overhaul. The famous Aero Glass effect has been discontinued and replaced with a more simpler interface. Instead of rounded corners, the windows are now squared and the title bars and other borders are not transparent anymore. Some people have welcomed these changes while others are still in love with Aero. If you are of the former type, you might find one thing a bit annoying. While everything else has been changed to be opaque, the taskbar in Desktop mode still retains its transparency. Now using a tool called Opaque Taskbar, you can easily change the transparency of the taskbar and make it opaque to match the rest of the UI.
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With data backup and syncing growing to become a somewhat of a necessity, the world of cloud storage services has become saturated with options for the end user. However, Dropbox still remains one of the the most popular cloud services with clients for all major platforms, including Windows, OS X, iOS and Android. Ever since the release of Windows 8, people have been waiting for the official Modern UI app for Dropbox. Well, the long-awaited app has finally landed in the Windows Store. The app doesn't seem to sport the kind of quality one would expect from a name such as Dropbox, but it does provide you with the basic functionality of accessing and viewing your cloud files and folders. Moreover, it lets you share cloud content over Facebook, Twitter and through email. Keep reading to find out more about the app and what's currently missing from it.
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Since the launch of Windows 8 and the Windows RT-donning Microsoft Surface in the last quarter of 2012, the Windows Store has come a far way in both quality and quantity of apps. Even though a vast majority of users may not care for the new Modern UI elements introduced in the latest iteration of Microsoft's desktop operating system, many among them will appreciate the value Windows Store apps add to the overall user experience. After your positive response on our compilation of best Windows desktop applications of 2012, we decided to treat our Windows 8 and RT using readers to a similar list. What follows is a collection of the best Windows Store apps that we covered during the past year. Even if you aren't a fan of the new OS, sift through the list once and see if the apps can change your mind about it.
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Websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Metacafe and Dailymotion have achieved their popularity due to their ability to host thousands of videos uploaded by users and let others view and comment on them without having to pay anything. Other than a huge number of casual users, these websites are also used by major content providers like TV channels, blogs, musicians and educators to host demonstration videos, tutorials, music videos, news coverage and pretty much anything you can think of. Due to the huge number of music videos available on YouTube, a lot of people use it to listen to music. If most of your YouTube access revolves around viewing and listening to music videos, we have a Windows 8 and RT app that lets you avoid having to browse YouTube for music videos by providing you with an interface focused entirely on them. YouVue allows you to watch music videos from different genres and gives you access to top music charts from different countries. You can create playlists, add videos to a favorite list, and view your history to listen to a track again.
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Local networks allow easy sharing of files between multiple computers but if there is a large number of files and folders shared on a network, managing all of them can be a bit difficult. If you are looking for a particular file or folder and don’t remember the computer it was on or its path on that computer, things can get a little frustrating. The Windows search option works great to look for files onyour local storage, but not quite so for network files. Today, we have an open source application for you called LanHunt that allows you to search for shared files and folders on the network. You can quickly search for network content and narrow down the results using file-type filters. In addition, the Open Location feature allows you to directly access the parent folder of a required file.
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Over time, a lot of files get accumulated in our hard drives due to downloading content from the internet or copying files from our cameras and mobile devices. We often end up with multiple copies of the same files, which is pretty annoying as they take up valuable hard drive space without serving a purpose. It is extremely tedious to look for duplicate files manually by browsing every folder, and even then there is a chance of missing out on many. There are several tools available that allow you to locate and delete duplicate copies of files such as GDuplicateFinder and Fast Duplicate File Finder. Free Duplicate Finder is another application for Windows to help you locate duplicate files, and its lets you do so based on file type including photos, music, videos, documents, executable etc. When found, the duplicate files can be moved to a different folder, allowing you to decide if you want to delete or keep them.
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While Windows 8 has built-in native support for compressing and extracting zip files, it requires you to access the desktop app, open File Explorer, and select the archives to enable the Extract tab. Some time ago, Waqas covered an excellent Modern UI app called 8 Zip that lets you view, extract and create ZIP archives on your Windows 8 and Windows RT device without having to switch to desktop mode but recently, the app went from being free to paid with a price tag of $7.99. If you don’t want to shell out that sort of cash just for extracting archives on your Windows 8 or RT device, have a look at Unpacker. It is a Windows 8 app that allows you to unpack compressed archives and supports multiple formats including ZIP, RAR, 7z and several others. It provides simple controls for extracting the complete contents of the archives or the selected elements only, to a location of your choice. More on Unpacker after the jump.
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With all the high-resolution cameras out there these days, most of the images we capture are in resolutions much higher than our display devices. Having a 2560p image to view on a 720p or 1080p screen does not offer any benefit when it comes to the picture quality, and having many such images can consume significantly high amounts of storage space. Image resizing is also very important if need to frequently upload images online, because larger images take more time to upload and consume more space on the server. Moreover, people visiting your website will have to wait longer for the images to be properly loaded and displayed. SendTo-Convert lets you quickly resize multiple images from the 'Send to' option in the right-click menu or via drag and drop, based on a profile you can configure.
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We have covered a lot of screencast applications that allow you to to create good quality screencasts, and each one of those provides you with a different collection of options to choose from. Some let you change the frame rate for the screencast, while others allow you to choose different resolutions for the video. In all cases, each tool has its own positive and negative points and, it is the requirement of the users that determines which tool suits them best. If configuration options overwhelm you and you are looking for a minimalistic, no-frills screencast capturing application, take a look at Screencast Capture Lite for Windows. It is a simple application that allows you to create good-quality screencasts of the entire screen or a selected area, without confusing you with any configuration options. Keep reading past the break for further details.
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Watching you favorite TV series after a hard day at work is a great way to relax. We all have our own preferences when it comes to TV series; some like comedy, some like suspense, while others go for drama. Though when you are busy with your daily life, it can be quite tedious to keep track of when a new season of your favorite TV series is getting released, or when an ongoing season is coming out of break. This information is easily available on the official websites of these seasons or channels, as well as third party webpages. However, if you are following a large number of shows, going to each of their websites or searching on Google for their return dates and other similar information can be a tedious task. Watchlist is an app for Windows 8 that lets you keep track of your favorite TV shows and notifies you of newly released episodes. Other than new app notifications, it also allows you to add different TV shows to favorites, view their cast, mark episodes as seen to get notifications about new ones, and browse artwork related to the shows.
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If you are into web/graphic designing, you must be familiar with the importance of a good collection of fonts. With millions of webpages available on the internet, and thousands more being created daily, it is the job of the designer to make the page stand out from the crowd and grab the visitor’s attention. Other than the position of different elements and the images, fonts play a major role in constituting a good design. One common problem for designers is that they have to constantly keep installing new fonts on their systems, causing the Fonts folder to become cluttered. If you have to check how a certain text will appear in different fonts, you will have to install all of them and uninstall them again when you are done, just to avoid overcrowding your fonts collection. FontLoader is a portable utility for Windows that lets you temporarily load fonts onto your computer and easily unload them once you are done testing them out with your project. The main purpose of this app is to enable you to keep the Windows Fonts folder clean. Keep reading to find out how this tool works.
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Steam is a digital distribution and communications platform developed by Valve corporation. Other than allowing people to play games with each other on the network, it lets you communicate with your friends, and manage your games across multiple computers. It provides gamers with a stable platform mostly free from glitches and crashes, to get together and enjoy their free time. Being a Steam user myself, I use game shortcuts placed on the desktop to run my games, instead of the steam library. Just like on Windows 7, you can place the shortcuts on the desktop in Windows 8 as well. However, since Start Screen is the home screen for Windows 8, opening the desktop first before launching the games just adds an extra step to the process. Today, we present to you an app for Windows 8 called Steam Tile that lets you pin your steam games to the Start screen and launch them directly from it.
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Podcasts are audio or video recordings that are released in episodes - usually released on a daily or weekly basis - that can be downloaded and played by anyone interested. They can be based on any type of content such as a political discussion, an opinion, a review about cars, etc. Unlike a radio or a television show, anyone can create and release a podcast, and they are hugely popular among bloggers, independent media producers and YouTube personalities. There are various application that let you download and listen to podcasts. A few days ago, Waqas wrote about the official Windows 8 app for SlapDash - a very popular podcast service. Today, we present to you another Windows 8 podcasts app aptly named Podcasts! that lets you listen to and watch audio and video podcasts neatly organized by different categories. You can also search for particular podcasts directly to quickly access them.
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If you've ever read comics, you'd know how each comic series has their own world with their own cities, background, characters, friends and foes. When it comes to normal cartoons such as the famous Tom & Jerry or Pink Panther etc., there is no need to know the history of each character in order to enjoy an episode; you can just start watching right in the middle of the episode and still have a fun experience. However, when we talk about manga, it’s a different story. Every manga series has its own story, set of characters, teams and history and in order to completely enjoy an episode, you need to know the appropriate information about everything. If you are thinking of watching a new manga that has already had a few episodes or season aired, you will need to catch up on the story. One way is to start watching the series from the start but if you would rather just enjoy the current seasons or episodes, getting to know some history about the characters and series is always a good idea. Manga+ is an app for Windows 8 that allows you to not only read manga but also get detailed information on the characters of each series, including the characteristics of a character, its friends, enemies, teams it was in, and biography.
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The history of whatever you do on your computer and in your browser is saved in different locations. Automatically created logs such as MRU (Most Recently Used) list, recently used documents and files, run commands, search history etc. all have their own storage location. While browsing, every page you visit, every word or phrase that search for, and any information that you fill in forms is stored and can be retrieved by anyone who knows how to access it. All this data is stored on your computer for your own convenience to provide you quick access to your recently accessed files and websites, help you with filling forms, keep your browsing sessions active so that you don't have to log in to web services each time, and speed up browsing by caching some web content. However, cleaning this data from time to time is advisable. Free Internet Eraser is an application for Windows that lets you protect your privacy by allowing you to delete such data. You can schedule the cleaning process to be performed at regular intervals, and set to restart or shutdown the PC once cleaning is done.
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Having a playlist of your favorite music playing in the background while working on the computer is a regular habit of a lot of computer users. However, most major media players such as Windows Media Player and several third-party alternatives have flashy interfaces and too many options that can easily distract a person from their actual work. Moreover, having so many options is useless for someone who just wants to listen to some music in the background. Some days ago, we covered the newly released GOM Audio by the developers of GOM Player that boasted a compact design and impressive features. However, if you are looking for a lightweight music player that does not put much stress on the system, does not have a lot of flashy options, and offers a simply way to play music from your audio collection, try resonicplayer. It is an audio player currently available only for Windows that provides you with a simple and user-friendly interface. Moreover, you can set a timer on the application to perform a number of operations after a certain time, making it useful for people who like to go to sleep while listening to music.
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(Graphic Exchange Format) files are animated images created by stitching together still images and playing them like a movie clip. The format is widely used on several entertainment websites such as Tumblr, 9gag, Memebase, 4chan etc., as it allows users to create simple animations without having to use a complicated image or video editing application. Previously, we have covered a lot of application that allow you to create GIF images, such as GiftedMotion. However, if you want to create GIFs from video files, you will need a different tool. Today, we present to you an application called Freemore Video to GIF Converter that lets you easily convert video files to animated GIFs. It support a lot of popular video formats including AVI, MP4, MPEG, FLV, MOV, and 3GP. Other than converting the whole video to GIF, you can also select a specific part of the video for conversion.
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With millions of files available for download in the internet, it is very important for you to have an antivirus installed on the systemyour computer in order to keep it safe and secure from viruses and other malware. While downloading executable files, one should be extremely careful since installing virus-laden program can lead to data loss and corruption. VirusTotal is a service that allows people to check a file against a large number of antivirus services and detect if there's anything wrong with it. Today, we found a third party portable app for the service called VirusTotal Uploader Portable that lets you check locally saved files, online hosted files and even running processes on the VirusTotal service.
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About Addictivetips

AddictiveTips is a tech blog focused on helping users find simple solutions to their everyday problems. We review the best desktop, mobile and web apps and services out there, in addition to useful tips and guides for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Read more...